LAWRENCE TIERNEY

You might best remember gravel-voiced Lawrence Tierney (1919-02) as Elaine Bence’s bald, scary dad on SEINFELD (1991) and Joe Cabot in RESERVOIR DOGS (1992). But Tierney, lookalike brother of actor Scott Brady, had a long career years playing gangers and tough guys years before in such films as THE HOODLUM, DILLINGER, SAN QUENTIN, THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE and BORN TO KILL. He also played the villain in Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 best-picture Oscar-winner, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, Tierney mostly dropped out of the movies. But then in late 1983 he returned to Hollywood and rekindled his acting career by guest-starring on television shows such as Remington Steele, Fame, Hunter, Hill Street Blues, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, The Simpsons, and the aforementioned Seinfeld.

Many of these actors achieved stardom because of their start in film noir; others, despite it. In any case, at one time or another, sometimes many times, they played cops and robbers, hoodlums and toadies, doomed anti-heroes and femme fatales in one of filmdom’s richest genres. And all of us fans of film noir are richer for that. A tip of the fedora to them all.